This is old news for anyone following Lineage, but this had captured my attention. It's being developed by a bunch of folks who left NCSoft and is currently the biggest budget MMO in Korea. Yes, I know, another Korean MMO, when will Tenchi ever learn his lesson after the letdown that was Aion. Before you pass judgement, just check out the trailer on their website and give me your opinion. http://www.tera-online.com/

One interesting aspect of the game is that there's no auto targeting, so combat seems more skill and reflex oriented than just knowing the most effective rotations.

I played a Korean MMO called Cabal that didn't use auto targeting and it worked well. It was PvP oriented, and one of the basic moves is a roll that actually untargets yourself, forcing whoever is attacking you manually retarget you. It was neat.

Some crazy shit in there. Also some interesting information. It looks like En Masse, the NA company who is publishing TERA, is made up of a ton of people who gave NCSoft the finger, including Aion's original producer ;p

It unfortunately strikes me as yet another cookie-cutter MMORPG in aesthetics. I don't care for the ornate-yet-generic and lifeless design school Korea seems to adore, since it does nothing to make the world or its characters the least bit memorable. Visually speaking, Korea and Japan are in the same place right now: total generica. Everything is taking on this incredibly clean, almost sterile look to it, and all the gold trim and spiky chair can't make up for that.

Whatever this game turns out being, it will be overshadowed by two ideas: The idea of Final Fantasy XI (and soon XIV since they share the exact same art style), and the lesser but still potent idea of Magna Carta (not online, I know, but everything Korean looks like it). The Baraka especially look like stolen character concepts from the Galka. The whole world description feels lifted from FFXI.

The character rigs are also... just awful. The movement is way overstated and not in a good way. Characters shouldn't twitch and heave like that; it's absolutely jarring. I just have nothing nice to say about how this looks. I refuse to be dazzled by hi-resolution graphics when the art direction has no soul.

Combat looks okay, but I highly doubt it will amount to anything more than "press A to auto-attack, click macros for spells, have a nice day".

I look forward to the day that developers, especially MMORPG developers, start looking at their game fundamentals and addressing those, instead of copying one another with yet another coat of paint slapped over a boring, archaic set of mechanisms. I know this is "calling it early", and that I haven't played it, but experience with Korean MMO's has led me to believe that the market therein has no soul, no creativity, and as yet is a very young child amongst its peers. Though I don't like MMOs to begin with, the exception being FFXI because of sentiment, Korean MMOs seem especially offensive in their regurgitation.